Nicolo Sertorio

Nicolò Sertorio (1968, Princeton NJ USA) is an internationally exhibited artist with over 15 years of experience in visual storytelling.

Nicolò works in fine art and commercial photography, mixed media, collaboration, and conceptual art. His photos directly respond to the surrounding environment by emphasizing aesthetics and everyday experiences. He seduces the viewer into a world thorn between equilibrium and the break of current issues by exploring the concept of landscape in the ‘romantic’ way of old European masters. His works sometimes radiates a latent violence and inner drama, while disconcerting beauty also emerges among the multiple layers of meaning. With his conceptual approach, Nicolò Sertorio investigates the dynamics of ‘landscape’, including its manipulation and the limits on our assumptions of what it means to us.

In past years he has lived in Italy, Switzerland, Ireland, Belgium, India, France, Germany and United States, and his work reflects those different cultural and aesthetic influences. His work has won several important awards, including American Photography 33+32+30+29, International Color Awards 2016-15-14-13, International Landscape Photographer of the Year top 101, Prix de la Photo Paris, PDN Photo of the Day, The Center for Fine Art Photography ‘Portfolio ShowCase 6’, Photo Week DC International Awards, among others. His work has been featured in Wired Magazine, LensCulture, Kontura Art (Croatia), Domus, AdWeek, Fraction, Double Takes, Time, Curator, Format, Nacional (Croatia), Total Croatia News, Fast Company, Bokeh Bokeh, Feature Shoot, Google ChromeCast, AIGA, Wacom, and ViewFind. In 2017 and 2015 Nicolò Sertorio was recognized and selected as Critical Mass fine art photographer at Portland’s Photo Lucida. In 2016, solo exhibitions traveled across US (Philadelphia) and Croatia (Koprivnica Art Gallery, Split Diocletian Palace, Virovitica Castle) museums.

Sertorio’s works tells a story about the effect of global cultural interaction between Self and Others, between our egocentric and human sides. His series are notable for their conceptual nature and the grand humanistic importance in his approach.

Nicolò Sertorio currently lives and works in Oakland (CA), USA. He is president of the Northern California chapter of ASMP.

Portfolio:

I grew up mostly in post-war Europe, when the economy was growing and the outlook to the future was bright. Globalization was going to bring the world together, plastics made everyday objects available at lower costs, international expansion and growth were the keywords. I moved to the US partly riding on this wave of abundance. Then slowly the hidden costs started to reveal themselves, in the forms now all too familiar: economic disparity, environmental pollution, abuse of natural resources, new diseases, global warming, loss of identity). Before we knew it, we were the generation having to pay for the sins of our parents. No matter where I turned, the guilt was there: for the food I ate (environmental and health damages of red meats, dangerous chemicals in everyday food, saturated fats, etc), the clothes I wore (third-world worker slavery, cancer causing materials, environmental pollution, etc), the job I had (large corporation avoiding taxes and civic responsibilities, exporting production for cheap foreign labor, selling illegal items under disguised entities, a focus on selfishness and profit, etc). I found myself wondering what it meant to live an honest life. I dropped out of my path, went living abroad, witnessed environmental degradation everywhere I went. I started to realize that I was witnessing over and over a loss of identity, that people stopped caring for the world around them as they felt they no longer had a stake in it.

This series is thus based on the idea that the current sense of disenfranchisement derives from the fundamental disconnect we have from the natural world and the social isolation that comes with it. In turn, the perception of the natural environment as something external drives our uses and abuses of environmental resources.